As per tradition, this isn’t a “Best Books Published in 2022” list. This is a “Books We Read In 2022 That Changed Our Lives In Some Small Way” list. Major publications may be able to keep up with the onslaught of new material each year, but as a humble brotherhood of three, sadly, we cannot.
This year, collectively we read about 100 unique titles spanning the years 1836-2022. Of those 100 titles, we chose 20 urgently demanding of your attention.
Happy reading!
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20. Dana Stevens – Camera Man
(Non-Fiction / Biography)
“He was an atrociously terrible businessman, an indifferent celebrity, and, until late in his life, a dilatory husband and father at best…”
“Cinema’s displacement of theater as the nation’s most popular and influential form of mass entertainment took approximately a generation, a span of time that happened to coincide with Buster Keaton’s first twenty or so years of life...”
Dana Stevens – Camera Man
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19. Raymond Carver – All of Us
(Poetry)
“I woke up with a spot of blood
Over my eye. A scratch
Halfway across my forehead. But
I’m sleeping alone these days.
Why on earth would a man raise his hand
Against himself, even in sleep?
It’s this and similar questions
I’m trying to answer this morning.
As I study my face in the window.”
Raymond Carver – The Scratch
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18. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
(Fiction)
“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
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17. Tomas Gonzalez – Difficult Light
(Fiction)
“Sara would have settled the matter in no time. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking “What about you, Angela – do you love him?” It would have sounded odd coming from an old man like me, and I think it would have made even me laugh. And for country people, or maybe for everybody, love with all its intensity works for a while, when people are young, but it eventually loses its meaning as it becomes clear that a couple’s relationship is a question of survival and can always be summed up this way: “To keep the earth from swallowing us, you go out and swing a hoe, and I’ll cook and take care of the kids.” Love: irrelevant.
That’s the tangle I’m in.”
Tomas Gonazlez – Difficult Light
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16. William Goldman – Magic
(Fiction)
“You’re an undeniable morsel, and I can’t imagine you having an adverse effect on the general public.”
William Goldman – Magic
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15. Wallace Stegner – Crossing to Safety
(Fiction)
“To have all of one’s physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, one one’s mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard’s steps in the corridor to assume and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn’t be concerned, one still had months to serve – who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?”
Wallace Stegner – Crossing to Safety
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14. David Diop – At Night All Blood Is Black
(Fiction)
“Don’t tell me that. we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God’s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. You’d have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing there’s almost no change you’ll come home alive. God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth.”
David Diop – At Night All Blood Is Black
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13. Harry Mulisch – The Assault
(Fiction)
“If you believe we shouldn’t have done it, then you also believe that, in the light of history, the human race shouldn’t have existed. Because then all the love and happiness and goodness in this world can’t outweigh the life of a single child.”
Harry Mulisch – The Assault
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12. Patrick Modiano – In The Cafe Of Lost Youth
(Fiction)
“For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me—the best part—that I will be forced to leave behind there.”
Patrick Modiano – In the Cafe Of Lost Youth
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11. Hilary Leichter – Temporary
(Fiction)
“The last time you see someone is never the last time you see them. The empty space a person leave behind retains heat; a retina will preserve a face for later.”
Hilary Leichter – Temporary
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10. Kurt Vonnegut – The Sirens of Titan
(Fiction)
“What were people like in olden times, with their souls as yet unexplored?”
Kurt Vonnegut – The Sirens of Titan
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9. Elena Ferrante – The Lost Daughter
(Fiction)
“How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.”
Elena Ferrante – The Lost Daughter
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8. Willem Frederik Hermans – An Untouched House
(Fiction)
“The bullets from their machine guns drilled into the nearby ground. It could happen now too, I thought, and I’m just sitting here, not doing anything, thirsty. I could get hit now too, as if sitting was punishable by death. But death comes for everyone, even without any wars . What difference does war make? – Imagine somebody who doesn’t have a memory, who can’t think of anything beyond what he sees, hears and feels. . . War doesn’t exist for him. He sees the hill, the sky, he feels the dry membranes of his throat shrinking, he hears the boom of . . . he’d need a memory to know what’s causing it.“
Willem Frederik Hermans – An Untouched House
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7. Jack Gilbert – Collected Poems
(Poetry)
“Imagine how impossible it would be to live if some people were alone and afraid all their lives.”
Jack Gilbert – Games
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6. Dara Horn – People Love Dead Jews
(Non-Fiction)
“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
Dara Horn – People Love Dead Jews
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5. John Le Carre – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
(Fiction)
“It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.”
John Le Carre – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
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4. Charles Yu – Interior Chinatown
(Fiction)
“Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have. Know something about this country that you haven’t yet figured out. If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and the gastropub waitresses with headaches are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.”
Charles Yu – Interior Chinatown
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3. Emily St. John Mandel – Sea of Tranquility
(Fiction)
“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
Emily St. John Mandel – Sea of Tranquility
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2. Annie Ernaux – Shame
(Fiction)
“In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn—things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.”
Annie Ernaux – Shame
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1. George Saunders – A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
(Nonfiction)
“Many young writers start out with the idea that a story is a place to express their views – to tell the world what they believe. That is, they understand the story as a delivery system for their ideas. I know I felt that way. A story was where I got to set the world straight and achieve glory via the sheer originality of my advanced moral positions.
But as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to “prove” anything.
In a young story we feel the writer in there, witty superior, entirely correct, often in the guise of some tormented but attractive character returned from an enlightening overseas trip, looking over, eyebrow raised, at all these other dopes who make up his culture. This has led to a general notion that a writer’s beliefs should be kept out of his or her story.
Though maybe it’s a question not of if a belief is represented in a story but of how – of what use is made of it.”
George Saunders – A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
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That’s all, folks. Now, go read a book!
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